Christmas and New Year's break

We are now closed for the Christmas and New Year's break and the office will re-open again from 9am on January 4, 2010. If you need urgent assistance during this time please leave a message on the voice-mail or e-mail me.

As we have done over the last two years, instead of sending out Christmas cards, we have made a donation to the Starlight Foundation.

Thank you so much for your support through a challenging year and we look forward to bigger and better things next year. We hope you have a very merry Christmas and look forward to working with you in 2010.

Dalai Lama fills Sydney

Last month it was Britney Spears and Pearl Jam that filled Sydney hotels, but they weren't as big a drawcard as the Dalai Lama.

I noticed a week or two back that Sydney was filling quickly this week and did some research to find out why. It was then that I found out the Dalai Lama was going to be in Sydney from the 1st to the 4th. Combine this with the end of corporate travel season and I knew it would be a busy week for the hotels.

With this in mind, I loaded up on rooms for this week and thought I had judged the demand fairly well but when I completely ran out of rooms on Monday afternoon I knew it was trouble. Sydney was close to filling on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday nights. From Tuesday onwards, each morning I managed to find only a handful of "affordable" rooms. If you hadn't got in early and needed last minute accommodation, you had to pay over $500 for a hotel.

Its getting busy again on Wednesday and Thursday next week in Sydney but I'm sure it won't be anywhere near as crazy for the hotels as it was this week when the Dalai Lama came to town.